Graduate Courses

This course looks at Renaissance epic poetry in relationship to classical models and as a continuing generic tradition. It examines epic type scenes, formal strategies, and poetic architecture. It looks at themes of exile and imperial foundations, aristocratic ideology, and the role of gender. The main readings are drawn from Vergil’s Aeneid, Lucan’s Bellum civile, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, Camões’s Os Lusíadas, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

David Quint david.quint@yale.edu

This course will look at Renaissance epic poetry in relationship to classical models and as a continuing generic tradition.   It will examine epic type scenes, formal strategies and poetic architecture.  It will look at themes of exile and imperial foundations, the role of gender and of aristocratic ideology.  The main readings will be drawn from Virgil’s Aeneid, Lucan’s De bello civile, Dante’s Purgatorio, Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, Camões, Os Lusiadas, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

This course investigates the theological aspects of modern political ideologies. It takes its title from the controversial work of the German political thinker Carl Schmitt, who argued that theological assumptions stood behind the veneer of secular politics. Concepts such as sovereignty, citizenship, universalism, law, and the state of exception have been said to have their provenance in Jewish and Christian concepts of God, election, Messiah, the commandment, and antinomianism. In recent years the study of the theological origins of political concepts has become important for both those seeking to critique the neutrality of certain western-democratic institutions as well as those hoping to better understand the relationship between religion and politics. Subjects covered in the course include sovereignty, universalism, law, election, commandment, messianism, and nationalism. Readings focus on the work of modern political thinkers such as Benedict Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, and Bruno Bauer, whose normative works assumed a direct relationship between the political and the theological, as well as those who have theorized the very idea of political-theology, such as Martin Buber, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Daniel Boyarin, and Giorgio Agamben.

This course investigates the theological aspects of modern political ideologies. Subjects include sovereignty, universalism, law, election, commandment, and messianism. Primary readings include Carl Schmitt, Martin Buber, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Daniel Boyarin, and Giorgio Agamben.

A systematic, chapter-by-chapter study of Heidegger’s Being and Time, arguably the most important work of philosophy of the twentieth century. All the major themes of the book are addressed in detail, with a particular emphasis on care, time, death, and the meaning of being.

The course is dedicated to three interrelated interpretations of Sophocles’ Antigone, which present divergent accounts of the central conflict of the tragedy and of the ethical character of its heroine’s act of burying her brother Polyneices, against the edict of the ruler of Thebes, her uncle Creon. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel conceives of Antigone as embodying the natural (or “divine”) law of the family that opposes the instituted (or “human”) law of the polis. According to Hegel, both laws represent legitimate ethical claims, which is why their violent confrontation marks the demise of the very concept and reality of (ancient) ethical life. Both Jacques Lacan (in Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis) and Judith Butler (in Antigone’s Claim) develop their readings of Sophocles’ tragedy in critical debate with Hegel’s influential interpretation. While Lacan holds that Antigone does not represent first and foremost the unwritten laws of kinship relations but rather an ethical subject whose action reveals the essential connection between desire and death, Butler insists against Hegel and Lacan that Antigone should be understood neither as an embodiment of the “divine laws” of the family nor of the “symbolical” law of desire. To the contrary, Antigone’s own troubled family history suggests that she is the very figure of a critical destitution of the normativity of kinship relations. The course aims at both understanding and discussing the controversial constellation of these three approaches to Sophocles’ tragedy. Three questions are at the center of the debate: What does Antigone stand for? How should we conceive of the central conflict of the tragedy? And how should we conceptualize the ethical character of Antigone’s act to bury her brother? Particular emphasis is put on three insights that Antigone articulates: the tragic irony of ethical life; the deep ambiguity of individual autonomy; and the paradoxes of the normativity of kinship relations and the gender identities that lie within it.

An in-depth study of Boccaccio’s text as a journey in genre in which the writer surveys all the storytelling possibilities available to him in the current repertory of short narrative fiction—ranging from ennobling example to flamboyant fabliaux, including hagiography, aphorisms, romances, anecdotes, tragedies, and practical jokes—and self-consciously manipulates those forms to create a new literary space of astonishing variety, vitality, and subversive power. In the relationship between the elaborate frame-story and the embedded tales, theoretical issues of considerable contemporary interest emerge—questions of gendered discourse, narratology, structural pastiche, and reader response among them. The Decameron is read in Italian or in English. Close attention is paid to linguistic usage and rhetorical techniques in this foundational text of the vernacular prose tradition.

Course multi titled as ITAL781

Instructor: Millicent Marcus

This course examines Vico’s thought globally and in the historical context of the late Renaissance and the Baroque. Starting with Vico’s Autobiography, working to his University Inaugural Orations, On the Study of Methods of Our Time, the seminar delves into his juridical-political texts and submits the second New Science (1744) to a detailed analysis. Some attention is given to Vico’s poetic production and the encomia he wrote. The overarching idea of the seminar is the definition of Vico’s new discourse for the modern age. To this end, discussion deals prominently with issues such as Baroque encyclopedic representations, the heroic imagination, the senses of “discovery,” the redefinition of “science,” the reversal of neo-Aristotelian and neo-Platonic poetics, the crisis of the Renaissance, and the role of the myth.

Course multi titled as ITAL700

Instructor: Giuseppe Mazzotta

This course focuses on the literary debates, theological arguments, and scientific shifts taking place between the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1437–38) and the Council of Trent and beyond, by reading key texts by Valla, Cusa, Pulci, Luther, Erasmus, Ariosto, Campanella, Bruno, Galileo, and Bellarmino. It examines issues such as crisis of belief, the authority of the past, the emergence of freedom, new aesthetics, and the effort to create a new theological language for modern times.

Before 1961, Berlin was the best place in Europe to follow both Eastern and Western Europe’s emerging cinematic New Waves. And first in East, then in West Germany, young filmmakers developed distinctive approaches to political and documentary filmmaking, to the Nazi past and the Cold War, to class, gender, and social transformation. This course juxtaposes the two German New Waves, focusing on aesthetic ferment, institutional barriers, and transformation. Features, documentaries, and experimental films by Gerhard Klein, Konrad Wolf, Alexander Kluge, Herbert Vesely, Edgar Reitz, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Jürgen Böttcher, Heiner Carow, Frank Beyer, Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Helke Sander, Helke Misselwitz, read against other Eastern and Western New Wave films (i.e., by Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Andrzej Munk, Alain Resnais, Mikhail Kalatozov, Milos Forman).

Katie Trumpener katie.trumpener@yale.edu

This is a class on epistemology, aesthetics, and literary form. We read major works in empiricism and moral philosophy alongside poetry and fiction in several genres. We ask, for example, how do poetry, fiction, and the visual arts recruit and account for perceptual experience or consider material and natural objects? What happens when the empirical psychology of consciousness or the categories of the sublime, beautiful, and picturesque take narrative or poetic form? What sort of ethical models follow from formal or generic decisions? We focus throughout on how these topics have been discussed across the history of literary studies, and we pay close attention to current debates in the field, including those prompted by new formalisms and materialisms, critical race studies, cognitive literary studies, and the digital humanities. Authors include Locke, Behn, Defoe, Pope, Addison, Hume, Burke, Sterne, Smith, Kant, and Wordsworth.

A survey of theories relevant to colonial and postcolonial literature and culture. The course focuses on theoretical models (Orientalism, hybridity, métissage, créolité, “minor literature”), but also gives attention to the literary texts from which they are derived (francophone and anglophone). Readings from Said, Bhabha, Spivak, Mbembe, Amselle, Glissant, Deleuze, Guattari. Conducted in English.

Course multi titled as FREN946/AFST747/AFAM846

Instructor: Christopher Miller

What can be learned about 20th-century French literature from literary archives? This course investigates fiction by Proust, Céline, Guilloux, Sartre, Sarraute, Wittig, studying finished books in the light of manuscripts, letters, and historical sources. An exploration in particular of the idea of the “genesis” of a literary work. A number of classes will take place in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Conducted in English.

An introduction to classic twentieth-century Western and postcolonial Marxist theorists and texts focusing on historical and intellectual exchange between these critical formations. Reading theoretical works in conjunction with some selected literary texts, the course tracks how key Marxian concepts such as capital and class consciousness, modes of production, praxis and class struggles, reification, commodification, totality, and alienation have been developed across these traditions and considers how these concepts have been used to rethink literary and other cultural forms and their ongoing transformation in a changing world system. Writers discussed may include G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Toril Moi, C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Paul Gilroy, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Perry Anderson, Giovanni Arrighi, Cornel West, and others. The object of the seminar is to provide students with a solid intellectual foundation in these still-developing hermeneutic traditions.

Joe Cleary joseph.n.cleary@yale.edu

An introduction to classic twentieth-century Western and postcolonial Marxist theorists and texts focusing on historical and intellectual exchange between these critical formations. The course tracks how key Marxian-Hegelian concepts such as capital and class consciousness, reification, commodification, totality, and alienation have been developed across these traditions and considers how these concepts have been used to rethink literary and mass cultural forms and their ongoing transformation in a changing world system. Writers discussed may include G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Toril Moi, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Perry Anderson, Giovanni Arrighi, Pascale Casanova, David Harvey, and Melinda Cooper. The object of the seminar is to provide students with a secure intellectual foundation in these still-developing hermeneutic traditions.

Musil’s gigantic Man without Qualities (published 1930–33, 1943) is one of the quintessential modernist (interwar) European novels. After looking into Musil’s earlier narrative experiments, the course begins with the close reading of part I of the novel and then focuses on the main strands of its narrative network: modernization and mysticism; the end of old Europe and the rise of fascism; the Vienna Circle’s epistemology and the legal doctrine of accountability; love and violence. The intertwining of essay and narration in the novel, the theory of the novel in the novel, and the question of prose as form are at the core of the course. Readings in English or German. Discussions in English.

Musil’s unfinished, gigantic novel “Man Without Qualities” (published 1930-33) is one of the most quintessential modernist (inter-war) European novels. The close (i.e. selective) reading of the novel is introduced by examples from Musil’s earlier highly experimental narratives (Unions; The Blackbird), and it is accompanied by looking into Musil’s widespread scientific and socio-legal interests which are relevant for the novel (statistics and probability; the Vienna Circle and the modern science of philosophy; theories of accountability and the case study; Wagner and Romantic music; the theory of the image in the age of cinema). Taking the departure from the intertwining of essayistic writing and narration as it is characteristic for “Man Without Qualities” the reading centers on the self-theorization of the novel and, even more fundamental, the question of prose as literary form and method of notation.

Readings in English or German. Discussions in English.